I can imagine the Pirate Party suing some EU groups (governments, companies, whatever) because they are using US providers, and the US is not safe enough to conform with EU privacy law. And there's money on the line too, lots of EU companies will want the contracts that are going to US ones. And keeping jobs onshore is always popular with the masses.

The leading US internet companies are all built on a foundation of trust. Undermining that trust counterbalances the convenience of their services and over time new competitors without these trust problems are only a click away.

But I think what will really happen is that the administration, and the bureaucrats, and the security "services" in general will double down, be much more secretive about what they do, be much better at what they do (grants coming soon to a computer science department near you), be much more aggressive to prosecute and intimidate whistle blowers, and put more layers on the stonewall of denial.

The government has become self aware.

Even Schneier is stating that if you aren't connected with us social media, you simply stop to exist for certain groups of people. That rule applies to nearly every european user too.

I run businesses in the UK that deal with personal data and sometimes use US companies to do so.

There is a specific provision intended to fix the problem of exporting personal data outside the EEA to be processed in the US, which would otherwise be prohibited because US laws are inadequate in this area: the US Department of Commerce operates a Safe Harbor scheme, recognised by the European authorities, which US businesses can participate in to demonstrate that they handle data with sufficient care to satisfy European standards.

The problem is that if the US government is going to permit itself to access data contrary to the claimed protections anyway, then the Safe Harbor scheme is demonstrably unfit for purpose, and any legal shield it provides to European businesses that want to use US-based services to process personal data is in doubt.

This problem is hardly a new discovery, but until recently, the issue was being dealt with quietly, with European officials making occasional mutterings about being in contact with the US government to resolve the conflict here. As of the past week, I'm not sure that's going to carry much weight any more.

This leaves a paradoxical position for any business wanting to operate legally in both the US and Europe. It's not clear whether the huge players like Google or Facebook could avoid the problem by changing their corporate structures, if doing so means that a parent organisation in the US would not be required to disclose personal data held and processed only in Europe by a separate European legal entity under European data protection law. In practice, this might be worse news for US businesses that aren't yet big enough to play the corporate structures lottery, and for those European companies who benefit from services provided by such companies and might have to make other plans. Obviously quite a few smaller Internet services well known on HN would fall into that category.

If you'd asked me a year ago how the paradox would be resolved, I would probably have cynically suggested that the EU authorities would ask how high when the US authorities told them to jump, as they have done previously with things like travel and banking data. But now that this has become a major public issue that people are actually talking about, any attempt to do that seems likely to turn out very badly for European authorities whose popularity is already at an all-time low. I suspect far more Europeans resent the constant privacy intrusions and security theatre of modern life than many across the Atlantic may realise, probably because the consequences of excessive state surveillance are still within living memory in many European countries, and because all around the Med we've been watching timely reminders playing out over the past 2-3 years.

But what the U.S. NSA is doing is sifting data for connections to foreigners who are suspected of being terrorists. I would be shocked if Euro intelligence agencies are not doing the same thing.

The U.S. data-mining program has been revealed. I would not assume the lack of revelations from other nations is definitive proof that those nations aren't doing similar things. In the absence of data it is very easy to make convenient assumptions.

The old rules still apply. If you can't afford someone else to know something, you have to encrypt it in motion and at rest.

Demonstrably false. All of the terrorist laws are mostly used for drug enforcement and the like. They get nearly no terrorist usage because there are nearly no terrorists.

There is a fear of having guns taken, but there is an even greater fear of using them against the regime.